Personal musings on Israel, Jewish matters, history and how they all affect each other

Monday, June 29, 2009

Mondowiess Expose

Jay Adler has a long, thoughtful and empathic analysis of the Mondoweiss folks. It hinges on Jewish identity, and how it can function or malfunction. Jay's reading is as compelling as it is, precisely because he more or less shares a starting point with the Mondoweiss folks - though of course he then took a different road. Read the whole thing.

Can we say all this of Mondoweiss? No, we cannot. Not really. For while Mondoweiss may at times espouse these positions, none of them are the end it seeks to serve, not even the ultimate end of a just settlement and a lasting peace. In conflict, a just settlement recognizes the legitimate desires of all parties, not the moral claim of only one. But the active agents behind Mondoweiss do not believe that Israel, or the Jewish people in relation to Israel, has just desires. Horowitz does not support the existence of a Jewish state. Blumenthal, like him, believes that Zionism (Jewish nationalism) – in apparent contradistinction to any other nationalism – is inherently racist. Weiss, a deeply anti-Semitic work in progress, in his haziest, most narcotic fantasy of peace, envisions as its ecstatic end not the peace, but the end of Israel.